A growing number of consumers now have high-speed, or broadband, connections to the Internet in their homes. The increased bandwidth provided by these broadband connections allows the delivery of digital television and/or video services to home consumers. One such technology for delivering digital television or video services uses the Internet Protocol (IP) as a transport mechanism. This technology is referred to as IP television, or IPTV.
IPTV makes use of a feature called “IP multicast” when delivering the same stream of television or video programming to a group of subscribers. The IP packets in the stream have the same IP destination address, which is a special type of address called a multicast address. All devices in the IP multicast group receive packets sent to that multicast address.
This use of multicast is much more efficient than sending unicast packets (addressed to each individual device in the group). However, the use of multicast addressing can lead to network performance problems in the home when a local area network (LAN) is used to deliver programming to multiple set-top boxes. Under some conditions, the result is that the viewer sees errors or artifacts in the video frames, or the stream freezes, or even that the set-top becomes unresponsive. Thus, a need arises for these and other problems to be addressed.